Caroline Colliard

Caroline Colliard, ‘Legend in the Cosmetic Industry’

Caroline had always been in my life since my childhood. She just recently passed away. She happened to be my best friend’s mother.

Caroline was the one who guided me to do Aromatherapy, as she studied herself years before with the famous Marguerite Maury and eventually became her associate. They started the first Aromatherapie Cosmetic Centre in Paris. She had a passion for Nature. Organics were always on her mind and she studied many of its disciplines.

She loved her work, working with essential oils and she also formulated some of the first range of products for the famous French cosmetic group: Decleor, which have proven to be their hero range much favoured by the customers.

I was ten when I first met her, beautifully elegant in a purple suit with a grey Astrakhan fur collar, a little hat posed smartly on her thick black hair to go with the ensemble. She was holding her dog Dalila when she burst in Isabelle’s apartment on the first floor of their mansion in Neuilly.

We had not met before and for months Isabelle had talked to me about her beautiful mother and also shown me portraits and oil paintings displayed on the walls of the grand salon, before we met the first time. So I felt that I knew her already.

She had the most welcoming voice with a singing tone: “What is your name?” Isabelle seeing that I was shy, answered for me, “Please meet Dany my best friend from the Lycee.” My admiration for Caroline really started that special day.

Even if we were young, she treated us with respect and listened to us and shared stories… we would laugh most of the time and her laughter was so communicative. It gave us that special confidence when you were near her. She totally shined.

She was such a happy and giving person, you couldn’t stop loving her. I shared many holidays with Caroline and Isabelle, all which were special.

She had a wonderful skin which she knew how to take care of. The years were kind to her, which left her with a special vibrancy, vitality and a beauty of expressions, dominated by her thick white hair in the later years of her life.

I owe her that wonderful day spent at her flat in Paris, when I met for the first time Marguerite Maury. We decided that day, after lunch that it was what I shall be doing: ‘aromatherapy’. Caroline convinced Marguerite Maury that it will be worth training me as I had some special gifts.

It was because of those two remarkable women who had decided that Aromatherapy is what I should do, that I abandoned the preparation to the Beaux Arts that year and all my life changed from that day.